Dream Job

December 27, 2022 | Amelia Dilworth BR ‘23

image description: a bee keeper working with a hive in a forest

I’m 30, and my life is perfect. 

Every morning, I swim out to the rock in the middle of the lake to catch the sunrise. I look out at the forest and at my faraway neighbors until the sentences come to me. I swim home and write on the cabin porch and then I walk barefoot through the forest. I know every bird and tree by name, and I feel absolutely no stress about finishing my book on time. 

Or maybe I am a journalist in New York City. My head spins with the chaos of Times Square and I love it. A taxi wooshes past me. I have high heels and short hair and I am a New Yorker heading home to a highrise apartment. My mind is still churning with ideas, piecing together a story, retracing interviews. I’m silently exploding with a muckraker’s passion for unraveling injustice. I’m about to write a story that needs to be told, but the city around me moves just as fast as my thoughts. I am always on a deadline, always working on a project, and I love it. 

Maybe I am a city planner. Maps and sketches cover the walls of my office. Reports and proposals are strewn across my desk. A dozen different spreadsheets are open on my computer. But I’m always out and about in this perennially sunny city full of friendly people. I know every street of this city like the back of my hand, but I also know what it’s like to live here. I’m on the subway and in corner stores and at playgrounds, asking people what they love, what they hate, where they play, how they get to work. Organizing our city is a spatial puzzle that my team and I can solve gently and thoughtfully, guided by our neighbors’ needs.

These are my dream jobs. 

When I asked other Yale students, most of them said that they don’t have a dream job. So I started to ask a more specific question: if money and prestige didn’t matter, what career would you choose? 

Many of my friends gave fast and detailed answers to this second question, wild daydreams they had never spoken out loud suddenly spilling out. Suddenly work became something exciting. They started speaking about jobs as a rare gift we might someday have the opportunity to receive. 

And, as I asked more and more students what they would do if they weren’t concerned with wealth and social status, I began to hear the same answers over and over again. I had this conversation all across campus, in dining halls and classrooms, in meetings and at parties—and I realized that we all share a few core desires. We all want similar things, even if we’ve never talked about them before. 

I propose that there are a few overlapping qualities that dream jobs share: discovery, creativity, autonomy, physicality, and community. 

Discovery

We are travel writers and scientists and Arctic explorers. Adventurers in far-off lands, losing ourselves in bustling cities, making friends on every continent. Kneeling in rainforests to marvel at bugs and brushing prehistoric soil away from bones in the desert. We lean over the sides of fishing vessels and out the windows of buses, feeling alive with the rush of the wind. 

We want the unknown. And we want to document what we find, writing it all down in yellowed notebooks or typing what we learn in trendy blogs. 

In a dream, Christina is a travel writer. She envisions “a good mix of well-traveled places, and places people don’t usually think to go,” “long periods of traveling interspersed with writing.” 

“I want any job that lets me travel,” Steve said, not even using writing as an excuse. 

Creativity & Autonomy

We own restaurants and bookstores and cafes. We produce video games and write young adult novels. We are voice actors and Broadway stars, artists and entrepreneurs, making  beautiful things that our neighbors love. 

Owning a restaurant was the most popular “dream job” when Yalies set aside money or social status. A restaurant that only opens from 5 to 6 in the morning. A restaurant in an old theater with the kitchen onstage. A hybrid bookstore-plant shop-coffee shop. 

There’s something irresistible about being the creator of a beautiful, welcoming place that nourishes people. 

But there’s autonomy and artistry in any industry. George dreams of running his own company. “It would be really easy to motivate myself to work, and to work hard,” he said. “I like the feeling of working on a project rather than being handed assignment after assignment. I like doing one project at a time.” 

Whether we want to write or cook, we love the idea of having the power to focus on making one thing, and making it well. 

Physicality & Community

We want work that is real and physical, and impacts the people around us for the better. We want to be coaches and camp-counselors, getting our hands dirty and teaching others. “It would have to be something with people,” Kate said. “Is anyone’s dream job a desk job?” 

Over dinner, Ryan told me that he would be a soccer coach. Working with a team, “moving muscles with other people,” provided the “sense of community” that he wanted. Our other friends around the table agreed— playing or coaching sports was a shared dream. They want activity, but need mentorship and teammates too. 

We like working with kids and taking care of people. Kofi’s dream job? “Definitely childcare,” he answered, naming another of Yale’s most popular dream jobs. I met many people who dream of being homemakers and stay-at-home-moms, explaining that there’s something desirable and meaningful about devoting yourself to others, and creating a place where the young are loved and loved well. 

. . .

We have such a clear, universal idea of what we want from our work. We want work that is real and tangible and active, and work that matters to other people. We want to explore the world and create beautiful places and we want physical activity. And then we want to tell others about our adventures, we want to invite them into our cafes, we want to teach and lead others. In our dreams, we don’t mind jobs that are slow and simple so long as we are doing real, good work. 

But most of us will not see these dreams come true. If the Class of 2021 is any example, 21.3% of us will be working in finance and 11.3% in consulting, while 0.73% of us will be Entrepreneurs and 0.37% in Outdoor Education. 

“I’m going to be a banker,” a stay-at-home mom tells me. 

“A computer scientist, probably,” the Arctic explorer says.

“I’m going into finance,” the graphic novelist says. 

And maybe this is for the best. We know that our dream jobs won’t really satisfy us. “It’s glamorous, aesthetically, but it has very ugly sides. It takes a lot of work you don’t see,” one travel writer told me. Dream jobs are all highly romanticized: we don’t imagine seasickness or dirty dishes or temper tantrums. And few of us have the skills and resources to simply “decide” to be a voice actor or open a daycare, even if we wanted to. 

. . .

The unenjoyable ugliness of labor is inevitable. Whether the restaurant owner ends up as a cashier at McDonalds or a consultant at McKinsey, work will be hard. But if work is a struggle, what are we struggling for? As the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes asks, “what gain has the worker from his toil?” 

Our dream jobs represent how we want to discover or nurture or improve our world. The fact that so many of us know we would only choose our dream jobs if money and prestige didn’t matter suggests that we aren’t choosing realistic alternatives to our dream jobs—instead, we’re motivated by social expectations and financial stability. And how could we do work that truly serves others if our primary motivation is to make our own lives more comfortable? Will some of us choose a career that benefits no one, as long as it promises us personal gain? 

Ecclesiastes suggests that profit is ultimately unsatisfying: “He who loves money will not be satisfied with his money,” and even when a rich man dies, he “shall take nothing for his toil that he may carry away in his hand.” If we’re working for wealth, but we’ll leave all our wealth behind when we die, is our work really worth anything? As Jesus asks: ”What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?” (Mark 8:36)

. . .

The Christian perspective liberates work from profit, and thus makes work infinitely more valuable. In Genesis, God created Adam and Eve to steward and maintain the Garden of Eden, giving them the responsibility, discovery, and community we all dream of. In Exodus, God commands the Israelites not to work on the Sabbath, because work isn’t the purpose of his people’s lives—He is. 

After asking what the worker gains from his toil, the author of Ecclesiastes eventually comes to the conclusion that “everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man.”

Ecclesiastses suggests that work will only be satisfying if we see it for what it is: not a fantasy, not a way to profit, just a way to make a living and stay busy. Work is the opportunity to use our skills and our time to help the Earth and its people.

God never wanted us to waste our lives toiling for temporary things like money or social status: he offers us meaningful, necessary responsibilities. With this view, we aren’t tempted to cut corners or waste time– we’re compelled to do a good job with joy, because we know the work matters.  

. . .

Some students, regardless of their faith background, already felt this way. 

My friend Mark paused for a moment when I asked what his dream job was. “If prestige didn’t matter…” he repeated, thinking over the question. “I think I’d still want to be a surgeon,” he finally said. “Someone comes in with a problem and they leave, hopefully, without that problem. It’s so rewarding and inspiring to have that kind of impact on somebody’s life.” 

Surgeons, certainly, are well-paid, highly-regarded professionals. But Mark’s main motivation is not money or prestige. He wants to help people live better lives. 

My roommate works in a paleontology lab. When I asked her what her dream job was, she said, “Honestly? I’m already doing it.” 

When I first started writing this, I— like many other students—didn’t think I had a dream job. I’m majoring in Urban Studies, and do a lot of writing—so were these dream jobs, or career goals? Was I being too idealistic by merging fantasy and reality? 

My dream jobs are highly romanticized visualizations. But I came to realize that the core of my dreams is a desire to love and understand the world and its people. Whether I consider money and prestige or not, I’m driven by a genuine desire to tell stories, to understand problems, and to help people. And while a dream job is a fragile constellation of circumstances, motivation isn’t limited to a single, highly-aestheticized profession: it’s applicable to many real world careers. 

So our dream jobs are fantasies, yes—but they allow us to ask whether the desires we’re following are really worth our lives. Would your career still be worthwhile if money didn’t matter, if all jobs made only a living wage? The answer might be yes. 

But if not, your salary is only the price tag you put on your life.